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Comment by mzw_mzw | Hacker News Reader

That was a very strange article with all the near-wishful "igniting speculation about a Clinton defeat" stuff. The whole emails issue has been inside baseball, politics-wise. Insiders and pundits love yelling about it but average voters either don't care (the vast majority) or have already assumed she's guilty/not guilty and priced that into their vote. Reopening the investigation is not going to change the election outcome.

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> average voters either don't care

What were you saying about 'wishful thinking?' A presidential candidate under FBI investigation on election day is huge.

I agree, it is! But that still doesn't mean people (or, at least, swing voters) actually care.

Her campaign staff certainly cared about this issue.

It's their job to care about this issue.

Swing voters are exactly who would care, as they should.

Edit: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/09/hi...

Voting for trump has got to be more loathsome to most that putting up with Clinton's shenanigans.

It seems few people are actually voting for Clinton, but rather voting against Trump. What is something like this leaves such a bad taste in their mouth that they decide to not vote at all?

This is definitely the risk. Especially with so many Dems saying "no one cares."

People do care; the way for leftists (like myself) to show that they care is by simply abstaining or going third party which would obviously cripple her.

Your gut's wrong on this one: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clinton-voters-arent-jus...

Most Clinton voters are voting for her, not against Trump.

A single phone poll of "a random national sample of 874 likely voters" (1 in every 350 thousand) does not a fact make in a nation of 300 million people. Sample size is just too small. Such a study would have to be repeated with a larger sample.

56% ± 3.3% at 95% confidence isn't good enough for you?

They are pulling the confidence level out of their asses. The Clinton campaign has been playing with the polling since the start of this campaign.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/26551

If this is real, it can be duplicated.

...that confidence level isn't from the campaign. That's just how confidence is calculated. The z score for 95% confidence is 1.96, so the range is:

1.96sqrt(0.56*(1-0.56)/871) ~ 3.3%

We aren't talking about the true population though. You can't use z-scores, not that it would make a huge difference.

FiveThirtyEight is extremely biased however, and greatly oversamples Democrats.

They don't actually even do polls they agrigate data from a variety of sources.

you understand what that email was talking about right?

oversampling is done to get a better view of specific groups. when put back in comparison to the population as a whole they are readjusted for their extra sampling.

those polls were also for internal purposes to the clinton campaign, and not polls that are actually released. so why would there be manipulation in an internal poll that would affect decision making in the clinton camp?

there is literally zero going on in that email but trump supporters saw "oversampled" and freaked out because they didn't know what it meant in regards to polling.

FiveThirtyEight is extremely biased.

Then it's awfully convenient for me that they didn't perform the survey or do the analysis, then.

Back that assertion up with polling data. The polls I've seen show the opposite.

edit: referring to the claim that Clinton voters aren't voting for clinton

I haven't seen any numbers that indicate the nation cares either way on this. Here's some analysis of Hilary getting slight gains after the announcement that FBI wouldn't prosecute.[1] Is your comment based on polling or just gut feeling?

[1] http://www.inquisitr.com/3287325/hillary-clinton-polls-did-f...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/09/hi...

This generally seems like a poor signal. People are very bad at reporting what affects their voting decision and a little better at reporting how they will vote. I would be much more apt to believe this was an important factor if we see a shift in the tracking polls or a significant shift in another.

> I haven't seen any numbers that indicate the nation cares either way on this

Regardless of if it will affect their vote (some it will, some it won't), people absolutely do care.

You're right. People do have feelings about this. I didn't mean to discuss feelings. I meant to use the word care to mean more specifically that this is not a deciding factor in a significant number of votes. Which is the only context that matters to me.

Both the candidates are under investigation.

http://www.snopes.com/2016/06/23/donald-trump-rape-lawsuit/

I'm inclined to agree that it's not going to make much difference; how people vote is more determined by their social group loyalties, especially when things are as fraught as they are already.

One is under criminal investigation by the FBI for actions that are blatantly illegal and we have concrete evidence of occurring. She got off the first time without charges due to a bullshit reason from the FBI ("no reasonable prosecutor would take this up").

One has received a civil lawsuit which means absolutely nothing and is based entirely on he-said-she-said allegations. There is no investigation. I could go file a lawsuit today against you for sexual harassment. It means literally nothing other than I paid an attorney money to go file a piece of paper.

I've heard many people cite emails as the main reason they are not voting for her. I assume most of them actually would never have voted for her anyway, but it's a real issue.

Those statements are always hard to trust, however, since you don't know how many of them are people who may not feeling comfortable stating their true beliefs in that forum or don't really care but are trying to encourage people they believe would vote for the other side not to vote at all.

I would bet that we're seeing a lot of that this year because there are many Republicans who don't like a Democrat winning but also aren't keen to have their personal reputation tarred by support for their party's candidate. If, say, you feel there is an immigration problem it's much easier to say something about email servers rather than trying to defend Trump's positions on the issue or defend yourself against charges of racism.

The majority of them have no idea what they're talking about if you ask them "what about the emails?" and are just parroting a talking point. Even if she was fully cleared and they were made aware of the fact that Republicans have done the same thing, it would not change their minds.

Exactly - I had an argument with one who kept parroting that she had 3 servers but only said 1 when asked by the FBI, when I asked if they knew what an email server was they had no clue

I've always voted democrat as "the lesser of two evils" but this email situation has really ruffled my feathers (and is why I am voting third party). I get that there is favoritism in everything, but the idea that Hillary (at least before looked like she) walked away scott-free after committing what I believe to be a very serious crime whereas any one of us in a similar situation would have been thrown in jail right away and smeared as a terrorist didn't sit well with me for obvious reasons.

While I get this sentiment, I would honestly like to know if you feel she has been judged fairly and consistently compared to other email related scandals out there. Most notably the bush white house emails [1] and Colin Powell's use of a personal email account (if not a personal server, though in some ways using an AOL email server has other complications over a private server)[2]

I'm not saying the email scandal is a non-issue, but I find it very interesting that so much emphasis is placed on what she has done despite plenty of other questionable incidents previously. It follows well the narrative that she is being at the very least held to a different standard than other politicians.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controv...

[2] http://heavy.com/news/2016/08/did-colin-powell-use-personal-...

Other politicians wished they were held to the same standard as the Clintons.

The Bush admin had plenty of other controversies and they were reamed by the media repeatedly for those (and justifiably so). It's not like it was hands off.

Maybe this is a bigger issue because of the continued lying about what happened, which is an ongoing issue for Clinton.

I admit her handling of the issue has not been great, but that is a trend with most of her "scandals". How she handles them is often worse than the scandal itself (in that there tends to be smoke but no fire).

This to me supports the idea she wasn't trying to hide her state dept emails where they couldn't be accessed via FOI requests. If that were the goal, they would have done what the bush administration did and use that server almost exclusively so that both sender and receiver were on a private server. As it was, emails to and from other state dept staffers using their state dept emails would have copies. If that was an attempt to hide official emails it was not a good one.

You left out Petraeus who did worse and still only received probation.

The reality is that most cases of mishandling classified information result in little more than a stern talking to from your manager, re-training, and a blemish in your file.

Probation means charges and conviction.

Those were bad, but there are differences that matter:

The law has changed. Requirements were less strict back when email was new and exotic. We don't punish people for violating laws passed after the not-yet-crime is done; this would violate the constitution.

Bush and Powell were not under investigation, and thus didn't destroy evidence while under investigation.

Bush and Powell didn't have the issues with classified material, possibly excepting one disputed Powell email.

I don't think most people would be jailed for it. There's no evidence of it being malicious so as my dad (who was in the military) put it, "if the government jailed people for doing things that were stupid there would be no one left".

You have _a lot_ more faith in the sanity of the Government than I do. Hell, I mean, the FBI statement itself said,

"Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case"

If a normal citizen were to have done the same -- a citizen which didn't have the same profile, stature, or benefits of connection as Hilary, the "reasonable-ness" from the prosecution's vantage point would likely sky rocket.

People are jailed for far less round these parts.

I don't like the double standard that would cause a lower-level employee prosecuted or worse, but if this is an issue I would like to see a more consistent standard applied across government.

Also, how many CEO's do you know that do stupid stuff with customer data and break rules in an organization? I'm not saying is right or that it shouldn't be punished but the double standard to me is the problem. If it wasn't Hillary nobody would care but there has been a marketing campaign against her for so long its practically Pavlovian at this point.

> If a normal citizen were to have done the same -- a citizen which didn't have the same profile, stature, or benefits of connection as Hilary, the "reasonable-ness" from the prosecution's vantage point would likely sky rocket.

Then again, a normal citizen doesn't really have a lot of people sending them classified emails. I don't think this is a situation where you can extrapolate from VIP to non-VIP…

I disagree completely with this. I _want_ to believe I live in a country where not only laws are applied but common sense too.

Do I believe Hillary acted with malicious intent? I don't. I do believe she broke the law.

The reality I believe in is that if it were me somehow in this situation, there would be no common-sense applied, just the letter of the law. No judge would look at my past and see someone making a mistake, or try to get to know me to better understand me. Just gitmo.

> Do I believe Hillary acted with malicious intent? I don't.

She just wanted email on her Blackberry so she could conduct business while traveling.

+1 I am also a lifetime Democrat who is not voting for Clinton for this and other reasons. I decided to vote for Jill Stein, rather than not vote at all.

> Reopening the investigation is not going to change the election outcome.

Perhaps true. But it does indicate who Comey thinks is going to win the election.

If you were the director of the FBI would you re-open an investigation of your about-to-be boss?

Comey already threw his about-to-be boss under the bus by publicly denouncing her deemed-legal behavior. What does he have to lose at this point?

I guess we'll see.

Or he is just doing his job and not worrying about who is going to be president? I don't know that much about him but I would like to think its possible for some people to be non partisan.

The e-mails should have put her in prison, and they would have put anyone else in the same situation in prison. But you're right, with her being her, they're a complete nonissue. They simply don't matter at all.

To be absolutely objective about it, there really are people in prison for doing with confidential state secrets what Secretary Clinton did with confidential state secrets.

[1] http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/kristian-saucier-inves...

There's a few likely differences, although it's hard to tell from the limited info in the Clinton case:

1) Saucier generated the classified information. He took the photos. I don't think there was evidence the Clinton was knowingly sending classified information to non-cleared individuals

2) Saucier himself deleted the files from his laptop after learning he was under investigation. The FBI in Clinton's case determined that there was no willful attempt to obstruct justice

3) The quantity and quality of the information likely differs. If the Clinton emails contained photographs of classified military hardware, we'd probably see more motion.

See Comey's quote comparing the Petraeus case to the Clinton case:

"So you have obstruction of justice, you have intentional misconduct and a vast quantity of information," Comey said. "He admitted he knew that was the wrong thing to do. That is a perfect illustration of the kind of cases that get prosecuted."

http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/07/politics/james-comey-hillary-c...

Regarding #2, there's some circumstantial evidence that there was an attempt to hide emails either through deleting them or not turning them over:

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/9272#efmBA7BOJ

The FBI explicitly investigated whether there was an attempt to hide emails. Here is Comey's statment:

> The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related e-mails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total e-mails remaining on Secretary Clinton’s personal system in 2014. It is highly likely their search terms missed some work-related e-mails, and that we later found them, for example, in the mailboxes of other officials or in the slack space of a server.

> It is also likely that there are other work-related e-mails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all e-mails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.

> We have conducted interviews and done technical examination to attempt to understand how that sorting was done by her attorneys. Although we do not have complete visibility because we are not able to fully reconstruct the electronic record of that sorting, we believe our investigation has been sufficient to give us reasonable confidence there was no intentional misconduct in connection with that sorting effort.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/07/politics/james-comey-hillary-c...

The biggest difference between the cases is that we know exactly what info this sailor had, how he got it, and why it was sensitive.

We don't know that about Clinton, and the reason that matters is because information does not get declassified just because it is publicly known. The full text of a newspaper article about a Snowden disclosure contains information that to this day is classified top secret or higher. Someone sending her an email about a NYTimes story could result in classified info in her email.

Another difference is that Clinton was legally empowered to determine which emails were work-related (and therefore must be archived) and which were personal (and therefore could legally be deleted). The fact that she and her team made mistakes in this process is not criminal; mistakes are not a crime. In addition the FBI recovered and reviewed many of these deleted emails and still recommended against prosecution.

The extent to which one can point to a classified disclosure prosecution and say "this is just like Clinton!" is exaggerated. The details matter.

Minor nit: she should be tried by a jury of her peers. If as a result of the trial she is exonerated, fine. She needs to be charged and tried.

"Scooter" Libby leaked the name of a CIA agent and got pardoned. It's time for Obama to pardon Hillary on this.

No, Bush just commuted his prison term. He was still convicted, disbarred, and had to pay the fine.

Obama pardoning Hillary might prove to voters that the system really is corrupt... That could backfire in a big way.

She hasn't been convicted of a crime. There is nothing to pardon.

You don't have to be convicted before you're pardoned.

For example, Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, even though he hadn't been convicted of anything.

A similar situation happened under the Bush administration and no one was jailed for it. Of course they were smart enough to use private email servers for both senders and receivers, and they deleted an estimated 22 million the emails.

It was also much more widespread, with 88 staffers having accounts on this server. Of course, there's no evidence that classified information was discussed, since they deleted the evidence. But it's hard to believe Karl Rove sent 150k emails without a single bit of classified information in them.

So there's precedent for think kind of thing being swept under the rug.

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